1. Field of the Invention
Implementations consistent with the principles of the invention relate generally to data communication and, more particularly, to peer discovery and secure communication in a failover scheme.
2. Description of Related Art
Fault-tolerance is a property of a system in which the system continues to operate properly in the event of failure of some of its parts. Duplication can provide fault-tolerance by, for example, providing multiple identical instances of the same system component and switching to one of the remaining instances in case of a failure.
In a fault-tolerant system, each system component may discover the presence of other components in the system. In one existing system, a component may transmit multicast messages to other components located in the same local network. This discovery technique, however, does not extend beyond the local network.
In a fault-tolerant system, each system component may exchange health information with other components in the system. In existing systems, the components exchange health information over unsecure communication channels. A problem that might arise, however, is that an attacker might insert poisoned health information into the system. The insertion of poisoned health information is a basic form of denial of service attack, where the poisoned health information might make it appear as if a component has failed or is otherwise unavailable (when in fact it is not).